"Skipdrive"

When
we found the things floating in the darkness between stars, we should
have been more afraid. Instead, a giddy joyous wonder gripped the world
like a fever. Every news feed shared the pictures of the two massive
creatures spinning slowly somewhere past the Oort cloud and speculated
wildly.

“Russia Sent A Probe To Chase Comets. You Won’t Believe What They Found Next!” was Google’s attempt to capture eyeballs.

We couldn’t read enough, know enough about those dark shapes.

Here is what we thought we knew: at the extreme edge of our system, just
past the distant ring of ice and dust that marks the blast radius of
our own sun’s kindling — the accretion disc — life was waiting for us.
Alien life forms the size of humpback whales floated in the black.
Encrusted with rock and ice, they looked like nothing so much as a mad
child’s drawing of a cuttlefish. The first two we found sported
tentacled limbs floating motionless in space and eyes larger than a man
placed in a ring around a cavernous mouth.

The very best radio telescopes and laser rangers were trained on the
lurking things. Each day the news was full of speculation. Did they have
hearts or brains? Were they alive? Were they explorers from an alien
world? Could they be dormant, awaiting an intelligent culture to wake
them up?

Seriously, we should have known better.

The narrative the media settled on was predictably optimistic: the
things were organic, living ships sent by a benevolent alien race to
explore the galaxy. They were probes of a sort, like our Voyager, taking
a message to the stars.

Of course we had to have them.

And of course, once we found two it took little effort to find more.
While our ship — my ship — was being outfitted to race out ahead of the
Chinese and the Pan-African ships to get our hands on the beasts we
found more. Lots more.

Some days it seemed that wherever the astrophysicists looked they saw
another Lurker. Once the eggheads knew what to search for it was easy;
they found dozens. Some of the Lurkers were as small as a car while the
largest would have given the largest dinosaurs a run for their money.

There were contests to name them on board the U.S.S. Melissa .
The smallest one — the thing that looked like a turtle with eight limbs
and no head — ended up with the name Raphael. Private Corrigan won the
lottery and came up with that one.

Our Chaplain, a bubbly Unitarian from Hawaii, she named the largest Leviathan. Everyone groaned at that. Too obvious. No art.

Sardines being sardines, the rest of the Lurkers ended up with names
spanning a breathtaking range of vulgarity. It’s the Navy, after all. We
may have been professionals. We may have been seasoned combat veterans
of the Pluto Conflict. But if you show us a life form fifty yards long
shaped exactly like an erect penis, well, we’re going to name it the
Cock Rocket. Can’t be helped.

No, I didn’t take part in the name lottery. Whoever won had to stand up
and shout the name for everyone in the mess to hear and I just haven’t
been comfortable with attention since the accident.

But I dreamt up some good ones.

*

The U.S.S. Melissa
was the last of the hive ships. The only survivor of the Pluto
Conflict, and even then just barely. Trust me, I have the livid purple
and silver scars to prove it. When she was built the idea was novel: a
modular ship, constructed in space, that could be whatever you needed it
to be. She looked from the outside like a squished shiny orange.
Looking close you’d see that her surface was covered in hundreds of
hexagonal doors in all sizes like winking eyes. Airlocks, of course,
leading to maintenance bays and cargo pods and fueling hubs and every
sort of service a growing space fleet needs. On the inside it was a
different story.

My grandfather served in the Navy, back when that meant boats in the
water and not hurtling through the void. He had photos of his time on a
submarine, which was basically a long skinny spaceship that moved under
water. Weird, right? He used to complain endlessly about his time
serving — not that it stopped mom from following in his footsteps. The
food was terrible. His shipmates were dullards. The boredom scraped away
civilization, leaving behind a yearning raw ache where your heart
should be. But mostly he complained about the space. Grandpapa was a
tall man, over two meters, and he spent his entire service ducking and
running back and forth through narrow corridors, the air slick with
condensation.

His stories sound like luxury now. I pull up the vidcaps of his chats
with us sometimes — I don’t know why, just sometimes being miserable and
feeling sorry for yourself is better than feeling nothing at all — and
there’s a part where he gets off on a tangent about a particularly awful
ship he crewed and he says, at the end, at least you’ll have it better.

It always makes me laugh.

The Melissa is the third ship I’ve served on. As maintenance
chief, I know her every bolt and plate. Her bundles of wires are more
familiar to me than the mangled reflection I see in the mirror. I love
the bitch. So when I say that she is the most uncomfortable ship in the
Navy you should know I’m not exaggerating. The eggheads that put her
together forgot to include space for a crew at first. Fills you with
faith, doesn’t it? One hundred and sixty-three atmo-locked
reconfigurable independent bays mounted around a central spinning hub,
outfitted with conventional drives. The outer bays are each separate and
flow around each other so that the docking hubs on the inner ring can
get cargo or personnel to the correct bay as quickly as possible. She
was designed to outfit and supply and repair an entire fleet at once.

From the inner ring it’s quite beautiful, like a giant beehive spinning
before you, every hexagonal cell full of boxes and tanks and
grease-covered half-naked grunts taking machines apart. When Nicolai and
I were still together we’d go stand at the edge of the ring, thirty
feet of empty space stretching between us and the spinning rooms full of
busy little workers.

A marvel of human ingenuity, to be sure. But they forgot living
quarters. They forgot lavatories. They forgot a mess hall. So at the
eleventh hour, when colonist aggression grew out of hand, they carved
out living space on the edge of the inner ring. Rooms little bigger than
coffins. Showers so tight you couldn’t sit, let alone shave your legs.
They put the mess hall in one of the smaller rotating bays. You ever try
to eat while every thirty seconds your entire room jumped in a new
direction? I swear every sardine aboard the Melissa lost weight on that tour.

I personally lost about forty pounds of bone and muscle and skull when
the bay I was in was imploded by a crazed colonist ship on a suicide
run.

She was an extremely useful ship, the Melissa, and that’s why we
were picked to go out to the edge of known space and to stuff our little
beehive full of those lurking things.

We were all set to go, too, and then China and the Pan-African Alliance
announced they were sending their ships — their closer, faster ships —
to fetch the first real alien life humanity had ever encountered. So the
plan had to be changed. We needed the Russians. Our old allies from the
Conflict were the only ones with a ship fast enough to get there in
time.

The Russians could get there but they had no place to put any specimens
they caught. We could hold all of them, but would take weeks to get
there. The solution was obvious, like chocolate and peanut butter.

Through the center of the Melissa they drove the Russian Kerensky-class corvette, the Chernobog.
From a distance the two ships together looked like a pencil stabbed
through an orange. We were in a hurry so we worked double shifts. Triple
shifts for those who could take it. Grafting the two vessels together
in an unholy amalgamation. The engineers were pretty sure — really —
that the Hoffman-Streibling Drive wouldn’t just tear the two ships to
pieces. But there was that chance. The skipdrive had only been used a
handful of times before.

Mostly I was worried about Nicolai. He was mustered to the Chernobog
— the “Chorny” — and it’d be the first time I’d see him since the
accident, since half my face and skull were ripped off when the walls
around me crumpled inward, since I lost an arm and a leg and a few ribs
to boot. No one knew that I’d been tied down in that empty cargo bay,
that I was wearing my one set of stockings and nothing else, waiting for
Nicolai to show up and take me again on the warm steel floor, our sweat
making us slide and bump and clutch each other tight to keep from
drifting apart.

He was late. Or I was early. I’d handcuffed myself to one of the safety
rungs in the starboard wall. It wasn’t our first time. Hell, at that
point it wasn’t our fiftieth time. The crew quarters could fit two
people snugly, but unless those people were contortionists they’d have
no luck getting busy in those cramped berths. It was an open joke. A
handful of the smallest repair bays — too small for even the vipers the
Navy prefers for ship-to-ship conflict resolution — were reserved
permanently for R&R.

When the crew first began using the R&R cabins people snickered and
made jokes, but as the Conflict dragged on and the colonists dug in, it
lost any humor . At best you’d see the cold glare of jealousy in
someone’s eyes across the mess as you reserved your room.

It was our turn then, in the R&R cabin. The fighting had died down.
The Collies had been quiet for days. Either planning something or
hashing out terms of surrender, everyone agreed. Suicide mission hadn’t
been on the list. Kamikaze strikes weren’t a thing you did. Ships were
too precious, too few, to waste them. No one knew why they did it. One
minute we were at a semblance of peace, stretched out better than naked
in a dimly lit brushed-steel cargo dock waiting for our
too-handsome-for-us Russian/Californian lover to engage in some
conventional thrusting and the next minute a ship piloted by a starving
madman tears open your world and pins you to a wall.

In the end, no one mentioned the stockings or the handcuffs. They
patched me up with the cheapest cybernetics the Navy could get away
with, gave me the minimum mandatory leave, and sent me right back up
into the black.

Only now no one looked at me the same and my lovely Russian paramour had been assigned away as a liaison to some Red Navy boat.

*

The
captain gave a big speech before we made the skip. Everyone was nervous
about the new drive — the Hoffman-Streibling Device. It collapsed space
or pushed holes around space or did things that didn’t make sense, no
matter how many times someone sketched them on napkins. The short
version was, the captain explained, that the drive would throw us across
space-time like skipping a stone across a pond. The journey would take
hours, not weeks. Then he rattled off a lot of optimistic nonsense about
duty and science and frontiers of knowledge but I lost track of the
narrative because at that point, in the largest bay, with all the crew
and personnel huddled together, I caught sight of Nicolai.

I swear I could feel the seams of my flesh burn. The purple scars that
marked where my skin ended and the flexsteel began ached and throbbed in
his presence. He’d grown even more beautiful, something in his face was
meatier. He’d put on muscle and changed his hair. He no longer looked
like the prettiest sardine in the can but rather like a movie star
pretending to be in the Navy for a scene.